Baxter Chang Patri Fine Art is pleased to announce ?The Contemporary Landscape?, a group exhibition featuring works by Lisa Blatt, Matthias Geiger, Bill Jacobson, Stephen Joseph, Kim Keever, Richard Lohmann, Chris McCaw and Denny Moers. ?The Contemporary Landscape,? which explores a variety of themes in contemporary landscape photography opens on December 8, 2005 and will run through February 28, 2006. A private reception for the artists will be held on Thursday, December 8th from 5pm - 8pm.
Traditional notions of landscape photography conjure up the work of artists such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. These artists sought to document the untamed beauty of the American landscape free from human interference. Adams searched for the sublime through the eye of a view camera in Yellowstone National Park and other picturesque locations. His images are symbolic of purity and, consequently, a call for preservation. The artists featured in ?The Contemporary Landscape? also try to evoke the awe-inspiring through nature, but they do not do so through literal means. The landscape is instead explored through the lens of imagination, memory, personal history, technology and metaphor. Susan Sontag wrote that ?Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.? Through different lenses, we gain a broader perspective on the varied perceptions of the modern landscape in photography. The modern landscape is seldom free from signs of human interference and thus cannot be divorced from the cultural context through which it is viewed. Landscapes are not static but in a continual state of transformation, the result of both natural and man-made phenomena. In sharp contrast to the works of early naturalist photographers, whose images portray the power and permanence of the natural world, the views in this exhibit are of shifting landscapes, seen through different perspectives and impossible to fix in time.
Kim Keever was born in New York City. Kim Keever started out his career as a painter, which is easy to comprehend while beholding one of his monumental photographs. His works, from a distance, appear to be old master paintings, reminiscent of the grandeur and romanticism of the landscapes characteristic of the Hudson River School painters. Yet, on further inspection, it becomes apparent that the work is not only photographic but a crafted landscape. Keever?s enigmatic photographs are created in a 100 gallon fish tank in his studio with a large format camera. The mountains are made of plaster, the trees out of branches or Bonsai, and the cloudy skies are created by the dispersion of paint through the water. Keever writes about his process, ?It?s so much fun to see the paint clouds move through the water and it all starts to look so real, I feel like I am watching a movie or I have been transported to this lilliputian world of my own creation.? The imagined landscapes Keever creates evoke the works of great American landscape painters and the photographers of the American West such as Ansel Adams, who sought to capture the sublime in the untouched landscape. Yet, Keever?s work has an air of the surreal and the apocalyptic. Jeffrey Cyphers Wright describes the dual nature of Keever?s photographs, ?An uncanny sense of kinetic energy lurks just under the surface. Nature is bipolar. Any moment, all hell could break loose.? In Summer: Blue, Yellow and Gray, an idyllic, mist enshrouded, pastoral landscape is littered with uprooted trees, which appear to be the remnants of a violent storm. The viewer feels as if they are witnessing the unraveling of nature?s creative and destructive forces. Edward Leffingwell writes in Art in America magazine, ?Keever takes the role of sole architect and recording witness to the first days of creation, or perhaps the last.? Keever?s work has been exhibited internationally, including a solo exhibition this year at Feigen Contemporary Gallery in Manhattan. He lives and works in New York City.
Bill Jacobson was born in Norwich, Connecticut and received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Jacobson?s blurred photographs are meditations on the impermanence of the physical world. They evoke the passage of moments fading off into the distance and the transience of our own days. #3529 is an ambiguous and haunting landscape, which unfolds through subtle forms. #4195 is a lyrical photograph, which follows the passage of an urban moment. Eugenia Parry writes in her essay Bill Jacobson, ?Bill Jacobson's photographs resist easy identification. They are blurred, diffuse, and atmospheric, depicting only the vague outlines of urban scenes, rural landscapes, and human figures.? His works are snapshots that we have all seen with our own eyes, but have long since faded in our memories Bill Jacobson writes, ?Most photographs are meant as documents of moments we wish to hold on to forever. My work suggests that these moments, like life itself, are constantly fading into the past.? Jacobson?s work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally, including a solo exhibition in 2005 at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan and a current solo exhibition at the Milliken Gallery in Stockholm. His work is included in the collection of many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Bill also has two published books of his photographs, Bill Jacobson 1989-1997 and Bill Jacobson: Photographs, which was released in 2005. Jacobson lives and works in Brooklyn.
Denny Moers was born in Detroit, Michigan. His photographic landscapes are lyrical and surreal translations of the visual world. Each of his works is a monoprint, meaning that it is a unique, irreproducible image. The variation in his photographs happens during the printing process. Moers shoots on black and white film and works with the traditional silver chloride print, yet with the selective use of light and toners during the printing process, he creates a wide array of hues such as reds, golds and blues. The final result of this process is that his photographs look hand colored, yet what we see is the result of a chemical reaction. Moers? work has been deeply affected by both music and poetry. His landscapes essay to go beyond the visual into the realm of emotion, as a poem echoes beyond its own words. Moers writes about the philosophy behind his work, ?I have always felt the visual experience -- landscapes, architecture, ancient forms -- and the monoprints I create from these places as an act upon the open field, sensitized to whatever I could bring to it and receive from it. Photographing and printing has always been that of transformation from the literal to the imagined, and from the seen to the felt.? His work is in many public collections, including the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Moers has two published books of his monoprints, Denny Moers: Figments of a Landscape and In the Ultra-Silent Light: Monoprints by Denny Moers.
Matthias Geiger teaches photography at UC Davis. In his Caretaker series, Geiger creates diptychs that juxtapose a real life image of seemingly untouched nature with an identical landscape that he constructs in his own studio. The constructed landscape includes human figures who through their interaction with the space, reveal their relationship with it. He writes about the Caretaker series, ?The landscape image void of figures shows natural beauty excluding any human intrusion. They stir our memory of a time before an all-encompassing human interference into our world. Completing the image pair, the figure in (or rather in front) of the second landscape represents different activities we perform in nature defining the figures in relationship to their natural surroundings further.? His work has been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at the Von Lintel Gallery, PS 1 MOMA and the Miami University Art Museum.
Lisa Blatt received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her minimalist photographs capture the vastness and emptiness of the desert landscape. Blatt writes, ?My interests include capturing light and allowing the viewer a perceptual and representational experience like that of being in the desert.? Her work has been exhibited at the Southern Exposure gallery, the Pro Arts Annual, the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery and the Oakland Art Gallery. Blatt recently returned from a trip to Chile where she was an artist in residence with NASA.
Stephen Joseph photographs the landscape in both three dimensional and panoramic views. His whimsical landscape photographs in this exhibition are of Mt. Diablo, which he has been exploring and photographing for the past twenty years. Joseph is currently working on a book of artists in their studios and his photographs will be featured in a book documenting John Muir?s botanical studies, which will be published by Heyday Books of Berkeley. He lives and works in Contra Costa County.
Richard Lohmann creates digital photographs with the soft tones and luminosity characteristic of a platinum print. Lohmann achieves this effect through hand blending six different tones of permanent Carbon pigment inks and printing on fine art rag paper. His landscapes possess a richness and depth unique to this form of printing. Lohmann?s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Richard Lohmann teaches photography at the College of San Mateo and lives and works in La Honda.
Chris McCaw was born in Daly City and received his BFA from the Academy of Art in San Francisco. In his Family Farm series, Chris McCaw documents the romantic and desolate landscape of his family?s almond farm in Manteca, CA. He creates these images with a home made 7?x 17? view camera and a hand coated platinum/ palladium printing process. McCaw writes, ?Since 1997, I have been committed to document this place and way of life that is disappearing in California... In 2002, I made the image ?Split Tree from a heavy crop? in response to the sudden reality of the future of this farm? This project will continue until the farm is finally gone, likely being covered by suburban homes.? McCaw has exhibited at the George Eastman house, the Palo Alto Art Center, Watermark Fine Art, Houston, and currently has a show at the San Francisco International Airport Museum
About the Gallery
Located in the Hotel Nikko at 222 Mason Street, Baxter Chang Patri Fine Art specializes in contemporary painting, sculpture and photography, and provides art-consulting services for corporate and secondary markets. The gallery seeks to cultivate a collection of artworks which represent a wide scope of media, function, and aesthetic; to showcase works of emerging or mid-career local and international artists; and to be a space which fosters, encourages, and inspires the appreciation and enjoyment of art. The gallery is co-owned by Holly Baxter and renowned San Francisco architect Piero Patri.
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